New Paths for Science: A Contrastive Discourse Analysis of Modifications in Popularizing Science through Digital Media

Abstract

This article investigates how oral utterances in science dissemination are modified in digital media, specifically on YouTube, to achieve their main goal of developing a scientific culture among the viewing public from their apperceptive background of responsive understanding and from within the discursive culture with which they identify. To this end, we analyze the transmission of alien discourse on the Brazilian channel Nerdologia and the American channel Scishow. The analysis is based, on the one hand, on the theoretical precepts of the Bakhtin Circle, and, on the other hand, on the theoretical-methodological proposal of contrastive discourse analysis. Based on this framework, we found relationships between the quantitative and qualitative occurrences of forms of transmission of alien discourse in the corpus. In both cases, they highlight similarities between the two channels, outlining a general spectrum of changes made by this discursive modality in digital media and point to their differences, related to the different discursive cultures actualized by the utterances.